A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (46 page)

After Jinda Wangchuk and the boy left, Gelong Tenzing thought long and hard about whether the boy was the reincarnation of Tulshuk Lingpa. He later contacted Jinda Wangchuk. ‘It is still too early to tell whether he truly is the reincarnation of Tulshuk Lingpa,’ he said. ‘For now put him on a pure diet—no meat, no eggs.’ He sent the boy a golden robe.

News of this spread throughout the valley. Lama Tashi came down over the Rohtang Pass and said to Jinda Wangchuk, ‘Now we must bring him to Simoling for his coronation. His monastery has stood empty for over ten years. It is time for him to return.’ They went to Gelong Tenzing but Gelong Tenzing refused to declare the boy the reincarnation.

‘Choosing the reincarnation of a lama as high as Tulshuk Lingpa is too big a decision for me to make,’ he said. ‘I cannot do it. I will write to Dudjom Rinpoche. He was Tulshuk Lingpa’s root guru. It should be up to him.’

He wrote a letter to Dudjom Rinpoche in Kathmandu with a photograph of the boy, explaining that since he uttered his first words he was saying he was Tulshuk Lingpa and that he had a monastery. He described how he witnessed the boy choose Tulshuk Lingpa’s photo.

There was tremendous pressure on Gelong Tenzing to accept the boy’s statements and his choosing the photo of Tulshuk Lingpa as enough evidence to declare him the reincarnation and to get on with the coronation. Unwilling to take on the responsibility himself and distancing himself from the decision, he told everybody that he was awaiting the return letter from Dudjom Rinpoche. ‘When I get the reply,’ he told everybody, ‘I will make the announcement.’

Then the reply came from Dudjom. Relieved that both the long wait was over and the decision was made by anyone but himself, Gelong Tenzing tore open the envelope and to his tremendous dismay read, ‘You are the one who has met the boy. You are there and you have both the knowledge and the wisdom. You knew Tulshuk Lingpa. Therefore you are in a better position to make the decision than me. Decide for yourself whether to coronate the boy.’

When Gelong Tenzing read this, he started to cry. ‘I can’t possibly decide,’ he thought to himself. ‘If something goes wrong with the incarnation, everybody will blame me.’

He travelled to Kathmandu to see Dudjom Rinpoche. Kunsang was then living in Kathmandu, so Gelong Tenzing first went to find Kunsang. They went out for a drink. It was after the third drink that Gelong Tenzing got the courage to tell Kunsang why he was there, that he might have found his father’s reincarnation. He explained how he had sent a letter to Dudjom Rinpoche. Then he showed Kunsang Dudjom’s reply. He started to cry. ‘If I knew how to decide,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have asked Dudjom in the first place. Dudjom has the powers necessary to make such a decision. He is supreme. If I could look into that boy’s soul and tell his past as well as his future, I would have decided myself. This is just too big of a responsibility for me.’

The next day they went together to see Dudjom Rinpoche, who was then living in Thamel. This was before Thamel was the tourist area of Kathmandu. Dudjom was very happy to see both Gelong and Kunsang. He hadn’t seen either of them in many, many years. He started asking them mundane questions, as if there was nothing to discuss of any importance. He asked them when they had come to Kathmandu, about the weather on the Plains and many other things. Then Gelong could stand it no longer. He broke down and started to cry. ‘Your letter said that I have to decide about the coronation of the reincarnation of Tulshuk Lingpa,’ he said, ‘Please, Rinpoche, please! I don’t have any idea about the future. When Tulshuk Lingpa was living amongst us, there was no one as educated as he was, not a single lama in the whole area. We knew he was learned but many of us didn’t know of his greatness. Now that he is gone and we know about the Hidden Valley, we know how precious he was. Now we realize. I have met the boy and, as you instructed, I try to guess whether this little boy will be as learned as Tulshuk Lingpa, whether he has that quality that would make him a
lingpa
. In your letter you told me to decide whether he should be coronated—but I cannot do it. I just don’t know. That’s why I travelled all the way here to talk to you and to ask you one more time to make the decision. Only a lama with your greatness can make such a decision.’

Gelong Tenzing and Kunsang stood in silence before Dudjom, with their heads bowed in reverence, awaiting his pronouncement. It took some minutes for Dudjom to respond.

‘I agree with you that the previous Tulshuk Lingpa was very learned,’ he said, ‘and his knowledge cannot be matched. But he was not lucky. He knew the way to Beyul, and still couldn’t make it. The world is worse than it was before. Times are even darker than they were before. People are not as lucky as they were before, so this boy will not be as learned or as lucky as the previous Tulshuk Lingpa.’

‘Are you saying he
is
the reincarnation?’ Gelong asked.

‘Yes,’ Dudjom Rinpoche said. ‘But it is better to just leave it. It is better not to coronate him. He will not turn out well. Just forget him and do not search for another reincarnation.’

Gelong felt a tremendous relief. Now he knew that the boy was in fact the reincarnation of Tulshuk Lingpa but the correct course was to take the unusual step of
not
coronating him. If he had given in to the pressure and had coronated the boy, things would have turned out bad and people would have blamed him.

When Kunsang told me the above story, it was thirty years after he and Gelong had met with Dudjom Rinpoche in Kathmandu. I asked him if he knew what had happened to the boy.

‘Though I never returned to Simoling after my father’s death,’ he said, ‘and though I didn’t return to Kullu and Pangao after my apple business, from time to time I do speak with people from there. Sometimes we meet when I’m in Kathmandu and they’ve told me what became of the boy.

‘Dudjom was right. The boy turned out bad. He used to beat up his parents when he was young. He was wild and unruly. He quit school at an early age. This was when all the young foreigners started flooding into the Kullu Valley and getting into drugs, and he fell into drugs as well. He got into bad company. Who knows what he did to make money when he was young but eventually he started driving a taxi. The last I heard he was in a little town not far from Pangao, working in an auto parts store. Maybe when you go you can find him there. But really it would be better if you also took Dudjom Rinpoche’s advice and forgot about him. He doesn’t have to appear in your book.’

I asked Kunsang how it could be that a great lama like Tulshuk Lingpa, who had the ability to direct his consciousness into his next incarnation, could chose an incarnation who was not only unable to fulfill his role but would turn out crazy and sell auto parts?

‘These are the dark ages,’ Kunsang replied, ‘and people will slowly stop following the dharma. Everything is degenerating. It doesn’t get better from here on. Every
tulku
, or reincarnation, should have increasing knowledge but it is not happening because of these dark ages.’

‘Still,’ I said, ‘if he is really the incarnation of Tulshuk Lingpa surely there must be something special about him.’

‘Yes,’ Kunsang said, laughing. ‘He beats everyone up!’

‘I guess it’s true,’ I said. ‘Tulshuk Lingpa was also a madman.’

I completed the research for this book in Sikkim and Darjeeling, which is where Kunsang lives, before I went to the Kullu Valley and to Lahaul to meet Tulshuk Lingpa’s older disciples. Kunsang had called ahead, and when I arrived there I was met by Tulshuk Lingpa’s grandson Gyurme, the son of Tulshuk Lingpa’s daughter by his
khandro
. There was also his close disciple Wangyal Bodh, the retired civil engineer who witnessed the splitting of the falling glacier. They took me under their wing and brought me around to other old disciples of Tulshuk Lingpa’s, the cave in Pangao and the monastery in Simoling.

Already foreseeing this Epilogue, I asked them if they knew the story of the reincarnation and whether he still worked in an auto parts store. They told me his name, Raju, and their opinion was much as Kunsang’s had been. They said I’d better forget him. After it was decided not to coronate him, he was still trained as a monk. So from the age of three or four they shaved Raju’s head, dressed him in a robe and tried to train him in the monastery that had been built just above the cave in Pangao. But it hadn’t worked. He was crazy. He used to run out of the monastery in the middle of winter and climb up and down the mountain without shoes. Their description of his life after leaving the monastery was much as Kunsang had described it.

When I insisted that I still wanted to meet Raju, that he was part of the story whether he was a ‘success’ or not, they told me he had quit his job selling auto parts and now lived in a city far away across the mountains near Shimla. He was driving a van to earn his meager fare and living in his vehicle. With no fixed address and no way of contacting him they advised me to forget him entirely, which I had no choice but to do.

I lived for three months in the Kullu Valley in a house in the middle of an apple orchard with my wife Barbara. She was working on her doctoral thesis in social and medical anthropology at Oxford, and I was conducting my research and writing the first draft of this book. She travelled with me to meet some of the old disciples of Tulshuk Lingpa’s and we journeyed together to Simoling. Because she spoke Tibetan, she was not only my lovely companion but acted as interpreter.

Towards the end of our stay, we were discussing any loose ends I might not have tied, areas I should look into further before leaving the place, stories I hadn’t yet gotten. I had just finished writing about the avalanche and Tulshuk Lingpa’s death, so it was natural that my thoughts would turn to the reincarnation. I looked over my notes and realized that though my informants had told me Raju had moved to a town near Shimla, none of them really seemed to know him. What they told me was based more on hearsay than on first-hand knowledge. It seemed that Raju was something of an embarrassment to the disciples of Tulshuk Lingpa. It was clear they would rather he did not appear in the book. While Kunsang seemed more open about the story of his father’s reincarnation, and though his story concurred with the others’, he had never met Raju and hadn’t even known his name.

Suspicious that Raju might still be selling auto parts, Barbara and I went to the small market town people had mentioned on the Manali road. It wasn’t difficult to walk from one end of the town to the other and to see there weren’t any auto parts stores. But there were two mechanic shops: one specializing in broken-down buses and the other in derelict jeeps. I had visions of a grease-smeared man sliding out ass first from under a jeep with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, looking at me with suspicion, jutting his jaw out and asking me in a threatening tone what I wanted. I did want something from him. I didn’t know what but perhaps a last word for this book, some pearl of wisdom from Tulshuk Lingpa’s reincarnation delivered by a thug.

At neither shop had they heard of Raju from Pangao and they concurred that there were no auto parts stores in the town and never had been. Our last chance was to go to Pangao and see if we could find any surviving members of his family there who might know of his whereabouts. I had been to Pangao with Gyurme and Wangyal to see the cave but we hadn’t had much time there. I had only met a few monks at the monastery. So we jumped a bus and hitched a ride and landed in Pangao, where we followed narrow paths down steep slopes by houses and the nunnery until we came to the house of Raju’s aunt, who was herself a nun.

‘Raju?’ she said. ‘You want to meet Raju? No, he’s not near Shimla. He lives just down the valley in a village at the base of the mountains.’ The place she described was but twelve kilometers from where we had been living for the better part of three months. She knew he had a mobile phone—he’d call once or twice a year—but she didn’t know his number. She brought us up a side path to her mother’s house, the widow of Jinda Wangchuk but she also didn’t have her grandson’s phone number. I tried to get from them something of Raju’s story, whether he was still crazy but they were reticent. It seemed they preferred saying nothing than speaking ill of a family member. All they would say was that he was now married and had two children. They claimed not to know much about his life. Since we had arrived in Pangao so late in the day, it was too late to leave so the family put us up. In the morning they gave us a photo of Raju as a young boy. We made our way to Raju’s village and found ourselves in front of his door.

Raju lives in a low concrete building surrounded by other concrete dwellings. His was perhaps smaller than the others but otherwise it was a home indistinguishable from thousands of others across the width and breadth of modern India.

We knocked on Raju’s door. It was opened by a fairly short, fairly round man with a big moustache and very warm eyes.

‘Are you Raju?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘We’ve come to see you.’

He seemed completely unfazed by two Westerners appearing unannounced on his doorstep.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘come in.’

It was then I noticed the words written on his T-shirt: ‘Positive People Don’t Put Others Down.’